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Lydia had first considered hurting herself when her mom got sick.
The doctors had put on a charade of optimism when explaining her mom’s condition (to her, at least). But Lydia always saw through the subterfuge of fake smiles and oversimplified medical explanations.
All the times she was sent to sit in the hospital’s waiting room so she wouldn’t hear the doctors give updates to her parents about her mother’s condition made it sickeningly clear that Mama wasn’t just happening to have a lot of “bad days”.
When her mom started losing weight rapidly— her, once flush, cheeks sinking in and her limbs becoming boney and frail— Lydia found that anxiety began to consume her.
And when her mom’s beautiful black hair started falling out and they had to shave her head, Lydia found that her worries and trepidations about her mother’s condition consumed every other aspect of her life, bleeding uncontrollably like watercolors on cheap paper.
Lydia had never considered hurting herself before. The thought of it seemed kind of terrifying.
She couldn’t say the same after her mom died.
-
The grief process was horrible. She ached for her mother in every way possible. She longed for her mama to come and give her one of her big hugs and a kiss on her forehead. It was torture.
At some point (Lydia found it impossible to say when; after her mom’s death all the days blended together) she found it horribly unfair that she could lie in bed each day and night while her mother was gone. In some unfamiliar way, she craved to be in physical pain that would match her mental anguish.
She hated that the grief she felt for Mama was a full-body experience. Her stomach turned, her heart squeezed, she felt like vomiting.
She hated that she could hurt so, so bad without ever really being hurt at all. She hated that it was all inside her head.
Lydia first hurt herself after her mom died.
-
It really wasn’t meant to become a habit. But once she worked up the nerve(?) (Lydia wasn’t sure she could really call it nerve if it just consisted of her focusing on how numb she always felt), what started as just a few rows of thin cuts on her upper arms started to take up more and more space until she had to move to her thighs.
The night they moved into their new house was the night of one of Lydia’s worst relapses. Before she met the Maitlands, before she and Beetlejuice haunted their house. All alone in their new house, her dad refusing to even acknowledge her dead mom.
Lydia had dug through the unpacked boxes in the upstairs bathroom until she had found her blades. The pain that night had been particularly gratifying.
But after meeting the Maitlands, and them letting her talk about Mama, and after she left for the Netherworld and Dad came after her, and after they all agreed to share the house and be one big family and be open about talking about her mom, Lydia had been doing better.
It still wasn’t perfect. She still missed Mama. But she slowly found that she stopped cutting herself as often. It started as a couple days. The next time she made it a week and a half. The next time a month.
But recovery isn’t linear.
-
6 months. That was Lydia’s first thought when she woke up. Six fucking months. Half a year since her mom died.
Fuck.
Lydia didn’t get out of bed that morning. She laid, donning an oversized band t-shirt and black sweatpants. Her hair was messy, she was sure, but she found it hard to care.
Rays of sun lit her room. She rolled away from the window. Its brightness was unwelcome. It was times like these she wished she took Delia up on her offer for a dark room.
After some time of lying there, dissociated, her stomach grumbled. She savored the feeling. Was this how Dead Mom felt?
Dead Mom. Lydia interrupted her own thought. Dead Mom. Lydia had stopped calling her that a while ago. After her dad started saying her name again. Emily.
Lydia curled into a ball, wrapping her hands around her legs. Her eyes burned a little, silent tears rolling down her cheeks.
When Barbara knocked on her bedroom door, reminding the teen it was time to get up for school, Lydia shouted some bullshit excuse about being too sick to go and told Barbara to leave her alone.
She felt bad, slightly, about snapping at the ghost. Barbara’s voice had been especially soft, as if she knew that day was the anniversary of her mother’s death.
But Lydia couldn’t find it in her to dwell on Barbara. She wasn’t Mama. Delia wasn’t Mama. She missed her mom.
-
The rest of the day passed like that. She laid in her bed, like it was the day after Mama had passed. She didn’t eat, telling Adam to go away like she had Barbara when the ghost knocked on her door to ask if she wanted a sandwich or chicken noodle soup.
Beetlejuice got the same cold shoulder treatment when he appeared to ask the teen why she hadn’t left her room.
Delia hadn’t even called her to dinner, instead knowingly leaving a plate of food outside her room and shouting past the shut door that Lydia could take the food whenever she was ready. The plate was left untouched.
All of them had this unusual softness to them. That was the worst part. They knew why Lydia was upset and they pitied her. They spoke to her in the same ear-grating, patronizing way adults spoke to her when her mom first died.
The only person she hadn’t hadn’t heard from by the end of the day was her dad. It was a melancholy realization, really. Was it wrong that she felt some relief that her dad was consumed by grief too? She didn’t know. At some point, she didn’t really care. Anything was better than his fake, overly-optimistic, “Everything this great!” attitude.
And so, Lydia laid in bed the whole day. She didn’t eat, and only drank the stale, leftover water she had left in a glass on her bedside table. She was left with a bad stomach ache and a scratchy throat from the hunger and dehydration, but she didn’t mind.
Her self-destructive behaviors were a blanket, warm and cozy. It was probably bad that she took such comfort in them, but they never failed to make her feel better. Numb, at least. And she wasn’t ready to give that up.
She thought about this, in the darkness of her room. Her refusal to eat, pushing her family away, her cutting.
Lydia rubbed her upper arms, tracing her fingers over where she knew her scars were. The fact that she could only barely feel where her skin changed from skin to scar tissue to skin again bothered her an unreasonable amount.
She languidly swung her legs out from under her blanket and onto the floor. She stood for the first time that day, tip-toeing softly out of her bedroom, over the plate of whatever vegan, gluten-free, kosher food Delia had made for dinner, and into the hallway bathroom.
The door shut quietly and was locked with a satisfying click.
Lydia turned on the lights and stared at herself in the mirror. Wow. She looked even worse than she expected.
Frizzy hair, bags big enough to carry groceries with under her eyes, puffy eyes, and flushed, tear-stained cheeks.
She rubbed at her eyes and cheeks and picked at her skin briefly before giving up with a dejected sigh. Good, she decided. At least her appearance matched how she felt.
Remembering why she came into the bathroom in the first place, Lydia continued her self-examination by lifting the sleeves of her t-shirt. She held her breath as she realized, with mild nausea, that her, once raised and slightly discolored, scars had settled into her skin as thin, pallor lines.
She stared at the reflection of her upper arms in an unsettled kind of disbelief. She leaned in closer to the mirror to get a better look at herself.
At that moment, staring at her past work, she wasn’t sure that someone who didn’t already know her scars were there would be able to tell she had scars at all.
Her stomach dropped, a lump forming at the top of her throat.
She took no time untying the drawstring of her sweatpants and dropping them to her knees. Her thighs were the same story.
She remembered how, when she would lock herself in her old room back at their old house or the bathroom at the funeral home where Mama’s funeral was held (she had begun keeping her blade tucked in between her phone and phone case for situations like those) or that one day sitting on top of the roof of their new house thinking about Dead Mom, the cuts would be horribly red and angry. How they would show the pale underlayers of skin briefly before blood pooled and spilled, dark red, down her arms or legs.
She remembered how they would scab over, how they would bruise slightly if she had pushed her blade too hard, how goddamn itchy they always were, how the little flakes of scab falling off would slowly reveal the fresh scars, a memorial of what she had done. What she was feeling. What she had been through.
She remembered how the scars would heal themselves, how some left discolored dark-ish lines on her skin while some were silvery and raised, how scar tissue (especially on the thicker ones) looked different from skin.
And now, she remembered how scars fade.
She pulled her sweatpants back up, digging through the right pocket for her phone. She unlocked it quickly, and took no time opening I Am Sober. The app rewarded her with a pop-up, celebrating her setting a new record for staying clean.
And, well.
Four months.
Lydia turned around and let herself crumple on the bathroom floor, back against the vanity. Four months. That was too long. She let herself watch as the seconds ticked by.
She watched as the second bar filled. Tick, tick, tick. Another minute of her being clean. Another minute closer to “recovery”.
What a stupid thought. More than stupid, actually. Lydia balled her fists as anger from the thought seeped in. Recovery? What? Because she hadn’t cut herself? That didn’t really mean anything. She had stayed in bed all day crying about Dead Mom. She hadn’t eaten a thing in over twenty-four hours. And the sight of her scars fading still made her want to vomit.
And all of a sudden, she hated that the app congratulated her on her abstinence from self-harm. She hated that her scars were fading. She hated that she could be called four months “clean”. She hated the idea that she was “recovering”.
She hated that she felt so awful while everything else about her situation made it seem like she was getting better.
She had promised Mama she wouldn’t forget her.
She didn’t intend to ever break that promise.
With unruly confidence, she stood from the tile floor. She turned back to the vanity and shuffled through a drawer filled with her various toiletries and unorganized makeup.
She dug to the back left corner, where she kept one of her spare blades. God, had she even used this one before? Never mind that.
She resumed her position on the floor. She toyed with the blade in her hand. Its subtle weight in her hand was comforting, in a sickening kind of way.
In the midst of the worst of the grief process, Lydia would sometimes get lost appreciating the beauty of the blade. Its shiny metal, always thin, but more so at the perfectly sharp edge. Its perfect symmetry from side to side, front to back, top to bottom. Its reliability.
And even now, she paused to get lost in the contrast in color between her chipped, black nail polish and the blade’s cool, metallic gray.
She missed this more than she’d care to admit. Her old friend, her source of support.
And of course, some part of Lydia was overly aware of how wrong this situation was. She tried her best to bury it, but even when she couldn’t she didn’t really mind. Was she sick for finding some modicum of pleasure in her guilt? She didn’t know.
All she knew in that moment was that every aspect of her current situation was comforting. The guilt and grief that wracked her brain and heart. The blade in her hand and her intentions with it. The knowledge of what the scene in the bathroom would look like in just a mere couple of minutes.
She let the ghost of a smile twitch on her lips as she accepted these things, like a reunion of old friends at a dinner party.
Ok, enough with her pretend formalities.
She took the blade from the palm of her hand to her grasp between her index finger and thumb. She observed her upper left arm for a final time before choosing an empty spot and beginning to dig the blade into herself.
She exhaled as she finished the quick movement. The stinging soothed her aching numbness, slightly, her head quiet. To her delight, crimson blood seeped from her arm ever so familiarly, first pausing to gather in the cut before collecting into a bead and spilling further down her arm. Mesmerizing.
The sight of what she had made of her body was immensely satisfying; ravishing, even.
But the blood didn’t make up for the meager feeling of pain. Child’s play.
Lydia was certain it didn’t even hurt.
If she had closed her eyes, it would have been like her shaking hands and the tickle from the bead of liquid down her arm were the only indicators of what she had done. Why didn’t it hurt?
She brought her blade back to her arm, repeating the action with more vigor. This time she didn’t wait for the blood. She continued, and continued.
She felt like an animal. Out of control, insatiable.
She felt as if her mind and body were at war; her arms and legs the battlefield. She was the general. Each cut was a soldier; each series of wounds a squadron fighting against her mental anguish.
The deeper the cut, the more brawny the cadet. The more blood drawn, the more effective their attack.
She planned each attack strategically. Her battalions were never outnumbered.
It had only been a couple of minutes by the time Lydia’s upper arms were covered in cuts and streaks of red where blood had once collected and spilled down her arms onto the tile floor.
Lydia’s favorite part of this whole mess was that the end of the first battle was never the end of the war. The war wasn’t over when the bleeding had stopped or when warm water had cleaned the dried blood droplets from her lacerations. One battle was never enough for her mind to submit to an armistice.
The war would continue, the sharp stinging from her clothing rubbing against her cuts in the days that would follow would bring her almost as much comfort as she got from opening the wounds initially.
But for now, in this moment— the present battle— Lydia could feel her mind winning. As soon as she let her arms go limp, allowing her blood to continue its course onto the bathroom tile, her worries were back.
This wouldn’t bring Mama back.
She tried to reason with herself. She tried to tell herself this was never supposed to bring Mama back. She was just trying to feel better.
That was when Lydia broke down. She gave in to the heavy lump in her throat, the stinging in her eyes. The hot, silent tears that had been slipping down her cheeks all day, but especially now, became loud, violent sobs.
Self-harm had been the one thing she had always taken solace in. It had been there for her throughout the entire grief process. It was the one thing that was just for her because God knows she couldn’t let Dad find out. Or the Maitlands. Or even Beetlejuice.
But Lydia’s luck had run out. She heard the attic floorboards creak softly and she quickly bit the side of her hand, attempting to conceal her sobs. The stairs squeaked as the person continued down from the attic and padded down the hallway to the bathroom door.
As the noises grew louder, and it became increasingly clear to Lydia that her time was up. She allowed her body to go limp once again. She let her hand go from her mouth, dropped her shoulders, and rested her head against the vanity. Her gaze dropped to her arms, which had already stopped bleeding for the most part, but still looked gruesome. In her disheveled state, she found it hard to care that someone was about to find her.
Maybe this is what she needed.
She blinked softly.
The person spoke.
“Lydia?”
Barbara.
“Lydia, is that you? Are you okay in there?”
Lydia considered whether or not she should respond. She exhaled, shakely, unsure if the ghost could even hear her and whether she could even count that as a response if she did.
"Lydia, you're worrying me.” Barbara shook the door handle again.
The teen opened her mouth to speak, but suddenly found herself unable to form words. She took another gaze around the room and felt a new type of guilt overwhelm her.
Barbara was going to open that door and see her like this. Barbara was going to know what a fucking mess she was and she would be responsible for any mental anguish she was going to cause the ghost.
She knew Barbara saw her as a daughter. And she was going to hurt her. Like a fucking asshole.
“Barbara,” She finally choked out. “Please don’t come in. Leave me alone.”
“Lydia.” Lydia’s name sounded so sweet on Barbara’s tongue. Even in a moment like this, when her voice was so full of worry that it hurt Lydia to hear. “I’m worried about you. I won’t leave you here.”
Lydia let out another sob. Barbara shook at the door handle again, this time popping open the lock. Stupid ghost powers.
“Lydia, I’m coming in.”
The teen squeezed her eyes shut, and, in a final attempt to allow Barbara to possibly find even some modicum of sanguinity in the mess, slid her blood-stained blade across the tile floor with two fingers, hiding it behind her. It was probably futile, she knew, but it felt more right than doing nothing at all.
Barbara finally swung the bathroom door open, somehow simultaneously gently and violently.
She found Lydia, her “daughter”, crumpled on the floor with bloody arms and a tear-stained face.
Her hands started to shake and her breath caught in her throat. Tears sprung to her eyes and she stumbled as she began to speak. “Oh, Lydia.”
“I’m sorry,” Lydia choked out, in a sob. “I’m sorry you weren’t supposed to know. You weren’t supposed to find me like this.”
Barbara dropped to her knees next to the girl. With one hand she took up Lydia’s hand and with the other, she wiped the tears from Lydia’s cheek.
She had already begun crying herself by the time she worked up her next words.
“Please don’t apologize. Please never say sorry for anything like this ever again.” She blinked to clear her eyes of tears before sniffling and continuing. “I hope I never did anything to make you feel like you couldn’t come to me with something like this.”
“Barbara,” Lydia mumbled. “You’ve never done anything wrong. I started.. hurting myself before I even met you. I promise it’s nothing ever done."
The woman wiped tears from her face and inhaled. The sight of the younger girl’s blood must have kicked in some sort of late motherly instinct because she choked down every ounce of guilt and shame and pain just far enough to regain control of her body. What Lydia needed right now was someone to support her.
She sniffled again before guiding Lydia to move to sit on the closed toilet seat. She excused herself quickly to retrieve a rag from the hallway closet and returned with a spare rag, Neosporin, and bandages.
“Can I help clean you up?”
Lydia nodded silently. The two sat in that silence, Barbara working dutifully to clean the blood from the girl’s arms and wounds.
Lydia closed her eyes as the rag was dabbed on her arms. The raw pain that followed the fabric being dabbed on her fresh cuts was usually more than welcome, but Lydia found it hard to enjoy when Barbara’s face was painted with such a pained expression.
Barbara continued, once Lydia’s cuts were cleaned, disinfected, and bandaged, to work on cleaning the floor.
Lydia stood aside her, washing her warm face in the cool water of the sink. She scrubbed below her eyes with her fingers and tried to smooth out her hair a little before putting it up in a ponytail.
The silent tension between the two as this happened was almost palpable. A small chorus of occasional ‘thank you’s from Lydia made up the entirety of the pair’s conversation.
When Barbara was finished cleaning and Lydia had freshened up, she found she couldn’t look the ghost in the eye. Barbara spread her arms to the teenager, and Lydia collapsed into the hug.
“Thank you,” she mumbled into Barbara’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
Barbara rubbed her hands soothingly, up and down along Lydia’s back.
“Don’t apologize.”
Lydia stiffened into the hug and Barbara let it go.
“Lydia, I need you to tell me what happened.”
The teen shook her head softly, never once pulling away from the embrace. She wanted to avoid burdening Barbara with any of her gross mental issues if possible. She didn’t deserve that.
Barbara sighed softly. She let go of Lydia to grab the teen’s hand and softly lead her out of the bathroom, down the hallway, and into Lydia’s bedroom.
“Come here,” She sat on the edge of Lydia’s bed, patting the spot next to her. Lydia obliged, wrapping her blanket around herself as she sat with the ghost. “That wasn’t the first time?”
Lydia found herself struggling to find words again. When she did speak, her voice was weak. “Cutting myself? No.”
She hesitated again. She was backed into a corner. She held a knife and Barbara was forcing her to stab her. Didn’t she see what pain she was forcing the girl to inflict upon her? Didn’t she understand?
“I started after my mom died.”
Barbara’s facial expression softened. It was the answer she expected, sure, but it still hurt immensely to hear it.
Remembering what day it was, Barbara reached out and grabbed ahold of Lydia’s hand again before she continued. “It’s the sixth month anniversary of her passing. Is that why you..?”
Lydia’s hand went slightly taut. “Um, I mean- yes. But, also no.” She wasn’t sure how to explain the relapse mindset to someone who had never hurt themself before. “It started as the sixth month anniversary of my mom’s death. But then it was the fact that my scars were fading. It kinda snowballed. I was four months clean but I felt worse than ever.”
Barbara nodded slightly, like she was really trying to take in and understand what Lydia was saying.
She was silent for a moment, briefly unsure of how to respond.
“Lydia, I know how much you struggled with your mom's passing,” She began. “But your mother’s death will weigh on you for the rest of your life. And you can’t resort to hurting yourself every time it becomes too much for you to bear.”
Lydia began tearing up again and sunk slightly into her blanket.
Barbara continued, “It’s going to be too much to bear a lot. That’s why your family is here. We want to support you. So let’s wipe your tears and be brave, okay? You’re so strong, Lydia. I love you.”
The girl fell into Barbara’s arms again. Her hugs would never get old. Sometimes hugging Barbara was uncomfortably similar to how Mama used to hug her. Sometimes, though, like right now, it was just what she needed.
“We can work with the whole family to make sure you feel supported. Oh! And maybe we can get you a therapist.”
Lydia winced slightly at the idea of telling the rest of her family about her self-harm. She pulled back from the hug to meet the ghost face-to-face.
“Can we keep this just between us for now?”
“Lydia, you know we have to tell them. You can’t keep suffering in silence.” She sighed softly, “You can have until the morning.”
Her stomach turned in anxiety. Her next words were nothing more than mumbles. “You guys mean so much to me.”
The two fell into another embrace. Lydia held on firmly, like she was afraid if she let Barbara go, she'd lose her.
“You mean the world to us too, Lydia. We love you so much, I hope you know that.”
Lydia smiled weakly, “I love you too. And I do know it, I promise.”